There are various applications used to create and edit web pages and other web content. Such applications often provide various visual tools and features that facilitate content creation. Visual representations of web page objects are often displayed to allow the creator to visualize how objects will be displayed in the resulting web content and, in some circumstances, edit the resulting web content by editing those visually-displayed representations.
The appearance of web content objects can be specified in various ways including through the use of cascading style sheets (CSS). Web content creation applications can facilitate the editing of both web object specific appearance attributes and attributes defined using CSS. For example, a content creator may select a paragraph object representation displayed on an editing canvas area and then use CSS style panels, property inspectors, and/or various other tools to edit the CSS styles that apply generally to paragraph type objects.
Web pages and other content often include hyperlinks that are distinguishable from ordinary text. A “link” generally refers to a hyperlink including any text or other object that when selected results in a navigation or other change in the displayed web page or content. There are various benefits to displaying links in different ways depending upon the “states” of the links. For example, a web page creator may desire that a link display differently when the user hovers over the link with the selection cursor. Similarly, it may be desirable to display a link differently after it has been used. Exemplary link states include link state, visited state, hovered state, active state and focus state. A web page or other content may include multiple links and the individual states of the different links may differ.
In editing an HTML page with CSS, pseudo classes can be used to define the states of links and thus the different appearances for a link in different states. Generally, in defining pseudo classes for links in web creation applications, links are statically displayed, i.e., in a single state, such as the link state. Since there is generally no active page behavior while editing in a web page development application, the appearance of a link in other states is not visually shown or editable on the design view. Web creators must instead use a code view or other non-visual tools to manually edit the other pseudo classes, for example, by directly editing CSS text.